Gratitude and Celebration

​Hello amazing friends! First, I want to express my deep heartfelt thank you to all of you for tuning in this week as I've offered you bonus blogs and videos throughout the week of our official launch of online classes! I also want to thank all of you who participated in our classes. Your presence, energy and feedback has been so amazing and tremendous!

Today, I want to talk to you about gratitude and celebration.  I will start with sharing my journey with these two practices, and then we will explore ways that you can begin to incorporate these concepts into your daily life.  I have been intentionally engaging in gratitude practice for the past few years.  It started out with me just saying “thank you.”  I would take just a few minutes each day to find things in my life that I could feel grateful for, and I found so many beautiful things!  As it turns out, once we start finding things in our life to feel grateful for, we start finding even more things and the practice becomes really fun!

This gratitude practice and the idea of celebration jumped to another level for me over the past few months since attending some Tony Robbins’ events. If you're not familiar with Tony Robbins, he is a personal development life coach, philanthropist, strategist, and entrepreneur. He wears many hats, and one is that he leads seminars for thousands people all over the world.  I attended a few of his seminars over the past few months, and they’ve been a really interesting complement to my yoga and meditation practices.  One of the concepts that he describes is that there are two master skills of life:

1. The science of achievement, and 
2. The art of fulfillment 

Many of us are well-versed in the science of achievement.  In my case, I have spent much of my life working towards degrees and certifications, excelling in my profession, and competing in athletics.  When I was younger, I also spent a good amount of time in the art of fulfillment.  I am blessed with an amazing family and we would often celebrate various achievements by going out to dinner and spending time together to really honor various aspects of our lives.  Throughout college and graduate school, my friends and I definitely had the “work hard, play hard” philosophy, and so we took time to celebrate after major exams and other milestones.  Somehow, as I entered my 30s, this art of fulfillment and celebration started to slip away.  I am the type of person who can just go through my day constantly finding things to do!  My yoga and meditation practices have certainly helped me to slow down, pause, and savor the moment.  But this idea of “celebrating” was not something I was doing much of anymore, until it was really brought to light for me at these recent Tony Robbins’ events.  I have now started to incorporate more celebration practices into my daily life, and it is amazing how good it feels!  

If you are interested in starting a gratitude and celebration practice, here are a few ideas to help get you started.  These are practices that I have been doing for the past few years, and more so over the past few months:

1. Simple daily gratitude practice
I do this every morning before I even get out of bed.  My first thought every morning is “thank you” -  thank you for this day, thank you for my life, thank you to the birds that are chirping outside of my windows singing their song as I wake up.  It literally takes only seconds!  As you're laying in bed, just saying thank you. 

2. Magic Moments
Every week, I spend five to ten minutes to sit down with my gratitude journal.  I think back to my past week and recall any moments that made me smile really big, laugh out loud, or brought tears of joy to my face.  Tony Robbins calls these types of memories “magic moments.” I jot down these magic moments in my journal and allow myself to relive those moments.  This practice creates a stacking effect of super positive emotions in my body and mind.  

​3. Dance
Most everyday, I turn on music and dance in my apartment!  I know it may sound so silly, but it is so much fun!  And, I cannot think about anything else when I am dancing.

Those are just a few ideas based on my own practices.  You can choose any practice that speaks to your heart so long as it cultivates feelings of gratitude and celebration.  These have been incredibly powerful tools in my life and I would love to hear how this works out for you!  If you decide to incorporate some of these tools into your daily life, please leave a comment below or send me a message to let me know how it's working out for you!

​Sending you love and positive vibes!!